Rathergate II: It’s not just CBS this time, it’s the entire 4th Estate.

If McCain wants to win this he needs to open fire on the Press.

No matter how bad their pro-Democratic/anti-Republican bias got, the GOP and its candidates have shied away from confronting the MSM on it – after all, they own(ed) the airwaves and we would need them at some point. However, new media has made this reasoning largely obsolete, and with many crossing the line into practically campaigning in favor of Barack Obama, we cannot allow them to continue to claim the role of disinterested observers.

Make no mistake, this is a big deal.

The MSM was bad enough during the Clinton years. Now note that they sure as heck love Obama a great deal than they’ve ever loved Bill Clinton. So think – if they’re this bad during the campaign, just how much trouble would the nation be in if they successfully get Obama into the Oval Office? How can the people hold a President Obama accountable if (and they will) the Press Corps continues to play the role of Barack Obama’s watchdog, spiking and burying stories unfavorable to their idol?

I therefore submit that it is time to confront this issue. A side benefit is that it just might help us win this election. I wrote this back in May …

It’s ironic, but it just might turn out that John McCain, of all people, would be the man to make the GOP [to finally] publicly open fire on the bias of the nation’s supposedly “non-partisan”, “objective”, but in reality 90+% Democratic voting Fourth Estate.

The idea: A web based daily news review show openly challenging and refuting the “facts” presented to the American people by the Obamaphile MSM. Upload each show on YouTube, LiveLeak, GoogleVideo, etc. and have downloadable versions in all audiovisual formats (mpg, mp4, avi, wmv, etc.) hosted on johnmccain.com and mirror sites.

The concept is simple; for the next 40 to 50 days (all the way up until election day), selected members of the McCain/Palin campaign would present the “Setting the Record Straight” where they would turn a brutally critical eye on the MSM campaign reportage and commentary that went on in the past twenty four hours (and beyond if necessary), naming names, issuing forceful corrections/refutations and putting the bias out into the open; from misleading headlines and ledes to the citing of partisan “experts” posing as disinterested observers, omissions, convenient “careless errors“, etc.

As a working example of what I’m talking about, take a look at NewsBusters’ NewsBusted channel on eyeblast.tv.

Without spending much more than what it would cost for a set of cameras and teleprompter, a fast internet connection and video/graphics editing software, and, at most, a few additional campaign (if even required) staff, “Setting the Record Straight” would be a practical avenue to neutralizing the MSM.

I guarantee that there would be millions of views within hours of the first broadcast being uploaded to YouTube. And no, the Press Corps would not be able to ignore it.

As for where the hosts would get their source material?

Every single day, bloggers on the Right are doing for free what the McCain Campaign should, by rights, be paying for – exposing, debunking and refuting the corrupted information being put out every day by the media in the hopes of getting Obama into the Oval Office. The guys at Powerline, Ace, Patterico, not to mention Newsbusters, etc. on a daily basis take wrecking balls to one misleading (and often, completely false) story after another … but at the end of the day, it’s a numbers game.

By itself NBC’s audience of persuadable swing voters (make no mistake – they are the target audience for all the anti-McCain attacks) in one night dwarfs that of the entirety of the Right-blogosphere by several orders of magnitude. Worse is that Powerline, Patterico, Newsbusters et al are mostly preaching to the choir.

But that is unless the McCain/Palin Campaign affords them its bullhorn by integrating what they put out everyday into its daily messaging operation. For its own benefit. By virtue of his being the Republican nominee for President, whatever McCain puts his name on immediately draws attention, especially when it’s as “controversial” as this is going to be.

We need him to put his name on this. ASAP. I don’t care a whit for credit – it’s not that original an idea on my part anyway. It just needs to be done.

Final note: If you think this is a good idea, don’t just nod in agreement and click away, get in touch with anyone you can who can advance this to where it can actually get implemented by the McCain Campaign. Fax it to McCain Campaign headquarters, make calls and make some noise.